Memorabilia
by Kimsa Ki-Lurria
Summary: Nanao x Stark. White mask, golden eyes. If she tries hard enough, he looks just like Kyoraku. "Nanao. Wake up."


The result of an odd liking for the pairing Nanao x Stark and reading Lady Azar de Tameran's "Watercolor World." Gave me a craving for a horror one-shot.

Summary: Nanao x Stark. White mask, golden eyes. If she tries hard enough, he looks just like Kyoraku.

Disclaimed.

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_Memorabilia _

She never closes her eyes. Her reality brims with white walls, white cushions, white noise. In this world, she has life and death and everything in between. And him. White mask, white uniform, golden eyes and earthen hair.

He is everything and nothing to her.

"Nanao," he says, bending over her, his face looming so close she can feel his breath pouring over her like molten silk. "Wake up."

_I am awake,_ she wants to say. _I am always awake._

"Do you know who I am?"

She looks him in the eye and blinks in a rapid movement, afraid that even such a tiny moment of separation from the world will leave her alone forever. Her lips part and the tiniest fragment of her soul leaks out, as it has been doing for far too long.

_Do you know who I am?_

"Kyoraku-taichou?" she murmurs, and begins to believe her sweet lie all over again.

His disappointment is faint and familiar to her. He wears it well.

"Go back to sleep, Nanao," he sighs. His hands come up to tuck her captain's bloodstained haori around her, his gloves cool against her cheek. He has never touched her without them.

He is so unlike her captain…but he is all she has of Kyoraku-taichou, and she will not let go.

"Sleep," he says, but she will not close her eyes.

The last time she closed her eyes, Kyoraku-taichou fell.

_His eyes are open and glassy when she sees them last, his mouth parted slightly as if to give her name one final endearment, a parting gift as he fell through shadow. She should have run faster. She should have never let him leave without her. _

_The gaping hole in his chest threatens to suck her in and swallow her whole. Her hands shake with shock and grief as they curl in the pink haori drinking up his blood like a thing dying of thirst. _

_God help her. God help her, she thinks she's losing her mind…_

The blood on Kyoraku-taichou's haori has lost its smell. She should wash it, but she can't bring herself to. Her soul screams in horror at the utter wrongness of wrapping herself in her dead captain's clothes and curling into the demon's side. Betrayal. She has betrayed Kyoraku-taichou, even in death.

Images come easily to her when she sleeps, even though she now slumbers with eyes wide open. Kyoraku-taichou's smile imprinted safely in place of the Espada's thin frown, his dark eyes instead of the gold ones that fill her days and nights.

If she tries hard enough, he looks just like Kyoraku-taichou. It isn't hard. It isn't hard at all.

He sleeps so much, sprawled next to her on their cushions, one hand thrown carelessly over his face. She wonders what he has to hide. She knows what she has to hide, so she bares it to the world in her wide, wide eyes.

Guilt. _She should have run faster to her captain, should have come to the Real World with him in the first place. _

Despair. _She is nothing like the emotionless, lifeless doll she is on the outside. Inside, her spirit writhes with pain and a complete sense of hopelessness that has begun to worm its way through her soul, taking small bites, like a crowd of termites wriggling through her veins._

Horror. _Every time she looks into the Espada's eyes, she sees Kyoraku-taichou's staring back at her. They are empty and accusing, lifeless voids where once she found her reason to live._

Sometimes, the emotion presses up in her like a living thing, trying to get out. When it does, she wraps herself tighter in her captain's haori and presses herself into the Espada's side. Only then will she close her eyes. Only then does the world fall away in blissful agony, and she can pretend it is Kyoraku-taichou she sleeps with, if she can ignore the silence she hears when she presses her ear against his chest.

She does not know how long she has been here. Weeks, months, years…decades. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters outside of this white, white room and their cushions and even the little blond girl who bounces around like a flea.

Still she does not know why the Espada chose her from among the other prisoners of war, one of many orphans of Aizen's victory. Perhaps he saw his own loneliness reflected in her, the way she holds him and calls him by the name of the man he killed, the man she desperately tries to find in his lazy manner, his unwillingness to fight.

It is only a matter of time. Only a matter of time before he becomes Kyoraku-taichou. She is patient. She knows how to wait for death to come.

"Nanao," he says once more.

She stares at him with wide open eyes, feels the warmth of his body leaning over hers and imagines it belongs to a dead man.

He sighs and leans back on his elbows, losing interest as easily as he always does. The loneliness weighs down on them as heavily as it has since the beginning of time and cold stone and Aizen-sama.

"Sleep," he says. "Close your eyes."

She won't. She won't let go. She has lost everything else, but this she will not relinquish.

He reaches up and closes them for her, his gloved fingertips pressing down into her eyeballs as the world slides from view. She lets him.

Anything for Kyoraku-taichou.

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A/N: Please review.

- Kimsa


End file.
